“I wrote it so that Joe and I could play even harder than we did on Hotel California”: Don Felder on the guitar duel that never made Eagles’ last 70s album
Former Eagles guitarist Don Felder has re-recorded his 1981 solo cut Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride) for his new album, The Vault – Fifty Years of Music. The song, he reveals, has its roots in the band’s late ’70s heyday, when he envisioned it as the ultimate guitar showdown between himself and bandmate Joe Walsh.
Felder explains that the track was written in the wake of the Eagles’ career-defining Hotel California, where his traded solos with Walsh had become the stuff of legend. With The Long Run on the horizon, Felder says he wanted to push that energy even further.
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“It was going to be a follow-up on The Long Run,” he tells Guitarist. “It had a real kind of heavy hand to it and I wrote it so that Joe and I could play even harder than we did – or edgier than we did – on Hotel California, against each other. It had harmony parts, trading-off solos and a much harder rock edge.”
A basic track for the song was cut during sessions for The Long Run, but deadlines (“We were just dying to get through this record,” the musician recalls) and tour commitments meant the band never finished it.
“We had a basic track, but it just died in the Eagles’ vault,” says Felder. “We just didn’t have time to do everything we needed to do. There were a lot of dropped ideas along the way, but I took the idea and turned it into Heavy Metal.”
The unfinished idea was resurrected years later when Felder was approached to contribute to the soundtrack for the animated sci-fi film Heavy Metal. Retitled Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride), the song found new life outside the Eagles’ orbit, but Felder has never stopped imagining what it might have sounded like as a full-blown Eagles guitar epic.
Now, more than four decades later, Felder says revisiting the track for his new album gave him the chance to finally update its sonics.
“After listening to it since 1981 or ‘82, just the tonality and the quality of it sounded kind of dated, you know? I thought, ‘I really like that song. I love playing it, and I play it at almost every one of my live shows. I just want to do a fresh version of it,’” he says.
Recorded with modern tools and production values, Felder insists the 2025 version captures the power he always heard in the song: “I used 96k Pro Tools, and with the remastering that we have today you can make things sound really great. So I went back and re-recorded it. It was fun to do and it just sounds a lot better to me.”
“Without the title Heavy Metal, that song could have, and should have, in my opinion, been finished on an Eagles record with Joe and I following up on Hotel with some dazzling guitar solos and stuff,” he says.
The post “I wrote it so that Joe and I could play even harder than we did on Hotel California”: Don Felder on the guitar duel that never made Eagles’ last 70s album appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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